Development of a Personal Finance Management App

Aryan Chaudhary, Aayush Sharawat, Anurag Tyagi, Garv Chauhan

Abstract

This research presents a design, development and evaluation of Personal Finance Management
Application (PFMA) that aim help the users record and follow their financial engagements. Cons —
The Apps contains features for expense tracking, budgeting, monitoring investment and goal setting.
Technical approach, tool used to implement, security measures and validation of the app in
associated with enhancement of financial literacy as well as behaviour in Users are deliberated in the
paper.

Topics: Personal Finances, Budgeting, Expense Tracking Financial Planning, Mobile Development,
Data Security

1. Introduction
Today, managing personal finances are more and more difficult and involving against the ease of
access to all sorts of financial products. Individuals notoriously have difficulty with tracking their
income and expenses, which makes for poor financial decisions. Answer: The current digital solution
for this is Personal Finance Management Apps (PFMAs ). This paper discusses the design &
development of an application which a mobile user can monitor his financial transactions and
manage them properly.

1.1 Problem Statement

With a plethora of financial management apps available, many users still find it hard to keep track of
their expenses, follow a budget and plan for future financial goals. Most of the existing applications
either were hard to use or did not offer real-time precise data.

1.2 Motivation

The feature-set and simplicity of an app that will aid the users in financial independence (keeping
track on daily spendings; manage your investments; set your financial goals) is large in the market, as
there are no such applications available.

1.3 Objectives

Objective: Build user (ie, OKRs) friendly personal finance managing mobile app

2.- Create features like budget creation, tracking expenses EXPENSE MANAGEMENT

and financial banking goals setting

3. to let the user data safe and protected.

________________________________________
8. Literature Review

For the research on personal finance software showed that there are numerous options out there
but they are far from having usability and full feature depth. While Mint, YNAB (You Need A Budget)
and PocketGuard offer the bare-minimum functionality that anyone would want from a budgeting
tool, take a look at personalized suggestions and investment tracking headlining your wish list. Also,
user privacy and data security are a big issue.

Lown and Southworth (2017) also stated the necessity of mobile apps that merged data from
different financial institutions to allow for its users to centralize their information in one place.
Furthermore, Bhatt (2018) research has shown the user stay away from complex financial tools and
described expertise in creating intuitive designs and delivering seamless user experience.

________________________________________

3 System Design and Architecture

PFMA uses a client-server model architecture with the mobile application as client and a cloud-
based server for user data storage. The system for managing the large amount of financial data has
been constructed, by which user will have privacy protection — end-to-end encrypted.

3.1 Tech Stack

1 – **Mobile Application:** React Native is used for the cross-platform application ( Android and iOS
app ).

2. Backend — Nodejs for request handling, firebase for real-time data storage and authentication.

3.Database: Store User data ( income, expenses , transactions ) using Firebase Firestore, Scaleble and
real-time database

4. Security : AES encryption for Data Firebase Authentication for secure user login

3.2 Features
1. Expenses tracking : Able to manually enter expenses or sync from their bank accounts.

2. Budgets: It allows users to set the base budget of each month, groceries, entertainment and bills.

3. Investment tracking: Working with financial institutions to watch the stock investment, mutual
funds deposit.

3. Target setting: The users can set two types of goals like savings or investment and keep an eye on
the aim.

5. The first one is a dynamic dashboard for data analytics, at a moment's notice users can see where
they're spending their money and savings, on this one use.

________________________________________

4. Implementation
A modular (As in each part of the app has a specific function) application : Expense Tracking, Manage
Budgets, Financial Goal setting and Security. Here the main components:

4.1 tracking of expenses

Inserts the expenses that user is adding in the app manually or by connecting their bank accounts via
secure APIs like Plaid. The expenses are auto-categorised and also manually categorize. The
expenses are listed as a freeform list with visualization in graphs of how they spend on each kind a
little from one to one without the formalities?

Budget and Goals

Users can also choose their monthly budget by income in the app. When the user goes over that
category's budget, they get push notifications. They can also take a savings goal, aiming to reach it
and follow the stats of their progress on.

Investment tracking 4.3

App monitors / integrates with financial data providers and knows the value that users have
invested. Its stock prices, mutual fund values and other financial assets are updated in real time.

4.4 Security

Using AES 256-bit encryption for financial data is something should be done. It makes use of OAuth
for authentication to guarantee user data is safe in the app. Users data stored in Firebase, each of
user are got separated data so no need to worry about Privacy.

________________________________________

5. Evaluation and Results

A pilot test that ran for one month with 50 users in order to evaluate the efficacy of this app. And a
lot of responses included:

1. easy for 80% of users to use the budgeting tool

2. 75 percent said they were more mindful of how much they were spending

3. yet some thought an equivalent look at investment analysis should be delivered at 70% So app
usability was high; users said the design was simple and finance reports were useful.

Conclusion and Future Work

The Personal Finance Management Application has shown its ability to help users understand their
spending, making a budget, establishing financial goals and managing investments, through
development.

10. Future Work

Future build could add things like AI advice from financial whizzes, more investment intros and a
wider comprehension of bank accounts.

Tax planning and credit score monitoring could also be added, if necessary should of course
otherwise further features.
REFERENCES

1 Lown, J. M., & Southworth, A. (2017). Mobile application and financial literacy for personal finance
management JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL SERVICES MARKETING, 22(4), 176-189.

2 Bhatt (2018). Barriers of personal finance management (PFM) in mobile applications: An overview.

3. Rajeswaran, G (2020). Framework for the development of mobile application on personal finance
management ICIC Conference

________________________________________